Work That Looks Like Not
My profession & work skill sets (mainly around either programming, writing and/or game design) are both wonderful & terrible. I am very lucky to have them. Also very unlucky.
What do I mean by that?
I'll talk about the terrible & unlucky side of the coin here now, down below.
One of the ways it sucks is that when you're working it doesn't *look* like you're actually working. So other people sometimes get mad at you, or show disrespect. They misjudge you, often wildly so. And some subset among the general population (of the US at least, that I can confirm firsthand) are especially small-minded and petty, even cruel about it.
Imagine a situation where a programmer or book author is sitting in a public place like a coffee shop or diner. With laptop computer and smartphone. Hunched over keyboard. Frantically typing away. Every once in a while pausing to stare off into space (while analyzing a problem or trying to sketch out a solution in one's Mind's Eye & inner Virtual Desktop -- a real thing that I do anyway and I know some other folks in intellectual fields can do too. But a geeky skill or neural ability which might be rare in the broader population.)
And there are... Normals (TM)... sitting around you or otherwise nearby. In that coffee shop or diner, just then. Able to see you and watch you, however surreptitiously.
What happens?
You could be working your butt off & people think you're merely... web surfing or socmedia doomscrolling. That you are chillaxing or goofing around.
You could be racing to hit an employer's project deadline but they (these misunderstanding observers) think you are merely... a maniac.
Utterly focused & prioritized extremely? Absent minded or coarse.
Hyper-productive? Lazy
And this general pattern of pseudo-paradox and absolutely bass-ackwards "Bizarro World" counter-intuitiveness extends to many other aspects of a person's life too, not necessarily related to work matters. To how others perceive them and judge them when encountered out in public:
Clueless? Author of five books in print. High praise from readers and critics. On topics requiring a pretty extreme wielding of "Having A Clue."
Stingy? Gives to five charities.
Messy? Picks up litter in public whenever they see it to help make their local community a little better place than otherwise.
Easy life? Suffered terribly.
Unsophisticated? Worked for the [VERY SOPHISTICATED-EMPLOYER-REDACTED].
A Python newb? (Implied when a recruiter on the phone ambush asks you basic Python questions unneccessarily) Shipped one's first commercial Python software (100% homegrown) over 15 years ago. Have public Python code on GitHub.
I could go on with more examples but I think I've illustrated the main point.
And I'm not sure what should be the takeaway. There might be several distinct ones, all true, and which can all apply in parallel. Despite seeming to be inter-contradictory among themselves.
One is that a certain percentage of people are just... terrible. Bad people. And so they make the lives of others around them worse than otherwise. What do I mean? They are petty, or insecure, or a bigot outright, or prone to being a bully. A percentage are dumb or just ignorant or insufficiently inexperienced. The latter, at least, is naturally self-fixing over time, and for free! Which is nice.
Another is that people like to make judgments fast and only on what they can observe directly in the moment. The evidence of their own eyes.
Which is... not wrong. In isolation and under ideal conditions, anyway, and in theory. In theory, everything is valid. In practice, rarely so.
But there are typically plenty of *other* facts also involved in a given situation where an external observer canot see them. The fact that they don't know them or can't see them will itself skew their deductions and lead them to misjudge. Sometimes terribly and tragically so.
Perhaps thats the larger takeaway I'd like to give readers. Well, a duality. A fitted pair of them? To wit:
1. That it *is* good to weigh heavily what you *can* see and know for sure, in the moment, with your *own* eyes.
2. Also, to be aware of how much you *don't* know -- have humility about that -- and therefore don't rush to judgment. Regardless, perhaps its best to focus on your *own* life and on making *it* better. Rather than risk harming or harassing others who might be very talented, and kind, and loyal, and generous, and super super hard working -- even a workaholic putting in 60+ hours a week for years, without vacation, in some cases!
In closing:
Always know about all the things you *dont* know about the people you see around you. We each have different fields of work, different styles and rhythms, different strengths and weaknesses, different accomplishments under our belt and very different challenges or personal burdens.
……………………….
(Credits: This piece has been gestating in my idle thoughts for years. But a comment made by “J.J.” helped inspire me to coalesce it down into a concrete draft. Thank you.)
. . . . .
pps. I'm building a new computer game in my free time, named Slartboz. It features the very same topic and phenomena in it too, but adapted to fit within the game's fictional world. It is meant to be Fun but also Edu-ma-cational (TM). Set in a dystopic far future US where everything that Can Go Wrong... actually has. And yet... what is good and wholesome about the human spirit still remains. A story about heroism from unexpected places...
Slartboz: